1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of operation support systems for a telecommunications exchange, which system provides centralized operation, administration and maintenance support for the exchange.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The operation and administration tasks in telecommunication networks relate essentially to reorganizing, changing and expanding system data, as for instance, the exchange, network, trunk group and subscriber connection data. It is important to be able to organize, modify or erase this data at any time during the operation of a system. The object of maintenance, on the other hand, is to maintain the functionality of a system by purposeful tests and to assure the operational quality of the exchange processes. The operating and maintenance personnel, therefore, must be able to communicate, via an operator station or man-machine interface, with the respective devices of the telecommunications system, where, for the dialogue with the operating and maintenance programs, particular operating procedures are given, as a rule, in an application-oriented command language (e.g. the so-called CCITT-MML or CCITT-Man Machine Language). The operation and maintenance can take place either for exchanges individually or on a centralized basis for several exchanges.
Arrangements known until now for the operation and maintenance of telecommunications systems require extensive documentation, reflected in a plurality of manuals. Their content consists as a rule of descriptions of the permitted commands to the system, of the permitted reactions of the system, and of the operating procedures. The latter establish how the individual operating and maintenance tasks, consisting of sequences or combinations of commands, must be organized with a simultaneous consideration of the system reactions. The care, i.e. the continuous updating of the documentation, may become very expensive, because, with every alteration in a system to be operated and maintained, a manual adaptation of the documentation becomes necessary, and the danger of introducing errors into the process becomes quite great.